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Stern, Management and taking Solaris as a feed

The meeting today was opened by Hal Stern (Sun Services CTO). He repeated & re-inforced several themes about utility and annuity or subscription services but interesting highlighted several things. Firstly he argued for an enlightened, liberating management style to harness talent, “Think XP, not waterfall” because waterfall involves management saying no or re-work it a lot and “does not scale”.

He also in a discussion about mapping AIM onto “Customise, Standardise, Utilise” raised the goal of offering Solaris as a service based subscription. The language I’ve been using is to make Solaris a real-time feed, enabling Sun’s customers to take advantage of the newest, most reliable and best as it becomes available. It is not in the customer’s business’s interest that they’re running on an operating system that can be up to 4 years old; the app will also be that old. It can’t be delivering the same competitive advantage as when it was conceived any longer. There is no doubt that a change in attitude amongst applications developers is required to make this happen.

One of the interesting things about doing these meetings is the way in which the execs re-inforce each other. Hal repeated some of the themes that Bill Vass spoke to earlier this week (blogged here..), most importantly the ideology enabling Grid architectures and Grid nodes (pods or super pods) was re-explored, in this case mapping it to service offerings.

Another of Hal’s point’s was the need to create and enable appliance level reliability for both hardware, software and applications.

One thought on “Stern, Management and taking Solaris as a feed”

I thought about whether to bring this forward, as it’s one that has on the whole passed it’s sell by date, either through poor reporting, or now being the bleeding obvious. AIM was “Architect, Implement, Manage”, Stern was CTO for Services and so was pushing a post sales engagement agenda. With respect to taking the OS as a feed, in hindsight at the cruder end is just charging more for the service update contract otherwise known as the Oracle route, but there were other alternatives. After experimenting with building a FIX appliance and being introduced to the bluelinq daemon I had come to the conclusion that Sun as an operating system vendor should publish as a programmatic subscription an operating system as a feed. No-one wanted to build it, and its unlikely that many would have bought it; other changes were needed, particularly in the development cycle. However the desktop vendors did move to this model, as have wordpress and their customers followed them and it is to this that Stern’s words around appliance may have been referring.